News

In order to foster and accelerate the development of full Open Access publishing in the physical sciences, as well as to coordinate better with the successful existing hybrid physics journals portfolio, Springer's STM division and BioMed Central have agreed to transfer and integrate PhysMath Central into a new initiative of the European Physical Journal (EPJ), EPJ.Open. EPJ.Open is a series of new, fully Open Access Physics journals to complement the existing portfolio of EPJ titles.

EPJ, a collection of well known physics journals jointly published by Springer, EDP Sciences and the Italian Physical Society (SIF) will announce its plans for full open access publishing in the course of 2011.

This development will benefit the Physics community due to the combined strength of Springer Science - with its strong global presence and long history of physics publishing - and BioMed Central - who operate a portfolio of over 200 open access journals and have demonstrated the ability to develop and sustain large scale Open Access operations.

Professor Kari Dalnoki-Veress of McMaster University, Canada, Associate Editor of EPJ E, has been awarded the 2010 Rutherford Memorial
Medal of the Royal Society of Canada for outstanding research in Physics.

A Colloquium paper by McEniry et al. published in EPJ B surveys the theory and
applications of a new family of computational methods, namely Correlated Electron-Ion Dynamics, which enable the simultaneous evaluation of the
electronic current, along with the current-induced forces and subsequent motion of the nuclei.

There is a divide, in quantum statistical physics, between the "ensemblists" who regard thermal equilibrium as a property of an ensemble (or a mixed state) and the "individualists" who regard thermal equilibrium as a property of an individual system (in a pure state). A long forgotten concept of equilibrium put forward by John von Neumann in 1929 is reanalyzed and shown to be influenced by both approaches, yet to be mainly based on the individualist view - a view that has gained ground recently.

Professor Daan Frenkel (Cambridge University), Editor in Chief of EPJ E is the 2010 recipient of the Soft Matter and Biological Physics award for his contributions to the development and application of computational methods that have transformed our understanding of soft and biomolecular materials.

The Royal Society of Chemistry established this award in 2008. The award will be officially presented to Daan Frenkel in spring 2011. The publishers and the EPJ E journal team congratulate Daan Frenkel on this prestigious achievement.

Members of the European Physical Societies represented in the EPJ Scientific Advisory Committee who choose to publish their EPJ paper in open access enjoy a 10% discount on the open access fee. For detailed information on how open access works in EPJ please click here.

A group of researchers in Greifswald, Germany, measured the electron concentration and electron temperature in the active discharge
zone of a self-organized plasma jet. Self-organized discharge patterns are shown as time averaged top view in the picture.

Miniaturized non-thermal plasma jets are an emerging technique for surface treatments at ambient pressure, such as cleaning, activation,
etching, films deposition and more.

The authors of this EPJ D paper used two independent approaches: spectroscopy and a two-dimensional fluid model calculation of a
discharge filament. The results from the two methods are consistent and indicate electron concentrations between 2.2 and 3.3×1014 cm-3.
This work represents a first step towards a thorough physical description of the discharge dynamics and energy transport to gain a better
understanding of self-organization effects in non thermal plasma jets.

Ground breaking experiments in EPJ B by D. Honecker and colleagues on an FeCr two-phase nanocrystalline alloy demonstrate the power
of one-dimensional neutron-spin analysis in a small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) experiment.